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Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration announced


Atariboy

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On 6/29/2022 at 3:34 PM, DavidD said:

See, I'll grab this for $20 on the Switch, but I'm PROBABLY not going to pay $40.

 

(I might succumb at $30.)

Have to agree with this. I'm more than willing to pay 20 bucks for arcade compilations and collections, but the 40 dollars that most want out of the gate are unrealistic to me. Maybe given the extra love and care it's worth a bit more, but I'm not foaming at the mouth for it.

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I think it's a brilliant package. Dud two hours on it over the weekend, probably only played fir a quater of that. Who'd have thunk that the reanimated corpse of Atari would churn out something with as much care and attention as this? Easily worth the price IMO, and I'm hardly a huge Atari fan.

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On 11/24/2022 at 2:04 AM, roots.genoa said:

My guess is it only saves high scores for the new, reimagined games, but for old games you have to manually save if you want to keep your high scores.

it saves the arcade game scores, at least the ones that i'm able to get high scores in. lol

 

it's a bummer the collection doesn't track like high scores for Tempest 2000.  :)

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On 12/5/2022 at 10:54 AM, digdugnate said:

it saves the arcade game scores, at least the ones that i'm able to get high scores in. lol

 

it's a bummer the collection doesn't track like high scores for Tempest 2000.  :)

In Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe, it'll retain the high score but if you leave, play another game and then come back to Asteroids, your score is gone. The save and load system just seems kind of wonky and not the most intuitive. It seems to tell you theres already a save file when I never saved before?  is there only 1 save slot across all 103 games? kinda confusing

 

From what Im hearing, the other Atari compilation for Switch retains scores, so I might check that out.

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On 12/9/2022 at 4:39 AM, dudeguy said:

From what Im hearing, the other Atari compilation for Switch retains scores, so I might check that out.

This should have been a total straight upgrade over the Flashback collection so I wonder what happened there.

 

On 11/12/2022 at 6:02 AM, roots.genoa said:

I agree with what you said, even though I don't think the games are that important here (I know, ironic for a video game).

I got a little excited about all those classic Jaguar and Lynx games being unearthed and then I realized yeah it's basically just Tempest 2K huh... the other ones look like an interactive guide to why the Jaguar failed. Not sure if I need to experience that tragedy first hand.

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14 hours ago, Daj said:

This should have been a total straight upgrade over the Flashback collection so I wonder what happened there.

 

I got a little excited about all those classic Jaguar and Lynx games being unearthed and then I realized yeah it's basically just Tempest 2K huh... the other ones look like an interactive guide to why the Jaguar failed. Not sure if I need to experience that tragedy first hand.

I think the Jaguar was partially a victim of market saturation. There were already two major consoles at that point, SNES and Genesis, and I think the 3DO came out around the time the Jaguar did. The 3DO was expensive but could actually deliver better graphics than the SNES and the Genesis, but you look at Jaguar games and they looked just like the SNES. I dont think the industry can support more than 3 major consoles at a time, especially now that we are seeing developers struggle to put a game across Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PS5, and Switch, it makes sense that a lot of games never got developed for Jaguar or 3DO when the hardware is so different.

 

I played Vector Sector on Atari 50 last week and thought it was awesome though I guess as a traditionalist I like seeing the games individually. It reminds me of a game like Grand Theft Auto where it's a shooting game but also a racing game, but also an action adventure game. I like that my high score is saved in the reimagined titles.

 

Haunted House reimagined is fun. I died pretty early on with that skull thing. couldnt get past him

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4 hours ago, dudeguy said:

it makes sense that a lot of games never got developed for Jaguar or 3DO when the hardware is so different.

Developers will learn to develop for all kinds of weird hardware if there's a paying audience there.   But to get an audience you need compelling games.   It's a catch-22.   By the 90s Atari really didn't really have the resources to pull it off on the software and marketing side

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21 hours ago, Daj said:

This should have been a total straight upgrade over the Flashback collection so I wonder what happened there.

 

I got a little excited about all those classic Jaguar and Lynx games being unearthed and then I realized yeah it's basically just Tempest 2K huh... the other ones look like an interactive guide to why the Jaguar failed. Not sure if I need to experience that tragedy first hand.

This is a museum more than it is a high score thing. It takes a lot of effort to make online leaderboards work, I'm glad they invested the effort in the historical stuff. I wish it at least saved scores locally, but maybe that will come in an update.

 

There is a lots of fun to be had with the Lynx and Jag titles on offer. They're mostly not the best of the system, but half of them are really good.

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17 hours ago, jgkspsx said:

This is a museum more than it is a high score thing. It takes a lot of effort to make online leaderboards work, I'm glad they invested the effort in the historical stuff. I wish it at least saved scores locally, but maybe that will come in an update.

 

There is a lots of fun to be had with the Lynx and Jag titles on offer. They're mostly not the best of the system, but half of them are really good.

Yeah I dont care about online leaderboards, like you I just wanted them saved locally. I'm competing against myself. I already know that thered be tens of thousands of people with higher scores than me on these games.

 

Though back in the day, I do recall my high score on Geometry Warz for the 360 being fairly high (in the hundreds I wanna say?) so maybe Id fair decentish enough considering the game is similar to Asteroids

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This collection made my regretful decision to sell my Jaguar collection a while back hurt a little bit less.. and gave me the opportunity to play Atari Karts, which sid a great kart racer.   The little collection of Jaguar games is nice to have on my Xbox.

 

Edit.. and the same could be said for the lynx games. I regretted selling that too around the same time.  But honestly I never played a lynx game that didn't feel broken, and I played probably 20-30 of them in original cart format.

 

 

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I got this for Christmas and I've been having fun with it.  I can't help but feel there is a missed opportunity though.  Part of what made Atari so iconic was not because of the games they created, but also because of the games they were involved with, turning pretty much every game from the '70s and early '80s into an "Atari game".  Space Invaders, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Defender... for one reason or another people who lived through the era will think of Atari just as readily, if not more readily, than they will of Namco, Taito, etc.  And this collection addresses almost none of that.  There is a blurb about the developers who left to form Activision, and surprisingly we do get a couple of Big Five Software titles, but that's it.

 

I know, I know, "licensing is hard".  And expensive.  Well there is an obvious solution to that: DLC.  I for one would happily chip in a few dollars more if, in addition to the package we have now, we could buy, say, a Taito collection with 2600 Space Invaders and Jungle Hunt, an Activision/Imagic collection with their heavy hitters (plus the best of the few third-party games the 7800 ever saw), a Mattel collection with some M-Network titles, a Namco collection, Williams, Broderbund, First Star Software, Konami...  Based on previous third-party deals Atari put together for the various Flashback game lists, I'm willing to bet it's in their power to do so, and then this could turn into an even more satisfying collection.  As it is, not being able to play the world's first game console killer app, nor the Lynx's pack-in title, nor the world's first third-party titles for a game console, makes for a rather spotty history of the company that was once synonymous with "video game".

 

I imagine about the only company you couldn't get involved is Nintendo.  And with only three games on the line, four if you count the very obscure Sky Skipper, that's a relatively small loss compared to what they could bring in.

 

(Or perhaps 2600 Donkey Kong could be a Switch exclusive?) 🤔

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I bet some of these licensed games like Defender could work with a simple renaming, as seen with Indy 500.

 

Of course the more accurate ports like Space Invaders did their job too well at replicating the source material to make that possible with any degree of confidence of being safe from legal action. But something like the example above with Defender is far enough removed from the original these days where I couldn't imagine WB Interactive even recognizing the 2600 game as an adaptation of their IP or if they did became aware, their legal team feeling like they had a chance in court if they pursued a lawsuit.

 

Rename it to something generic like Alien Abduction and spend a few minutes retouching art assets to replace the name (Just as they did for Indy 500 in Atari 50), and it would be fully in the clear.

Edited by Atariboy
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On 12/30/2022 at 1:55 AM, FujiSkunk said:

I know, I know, "licensing is hard".  And expensive.  Well there is an obvious solution to that: DLC.  I for one would happily chip in a few dollars more if, in addition to the package we have now, we could buy, say, a Taito collection with 2600 Space Invaders and Jungle Hunt, an Activision/Imagic collection with their heavy hitters (plus the best of the few third-party games the 7800 ever saw), a Mattel collection with some M-Network titles, a Namco collection, Williams, Broderbund, First Star Software, Konami...  Based on previous third-party deals Atari put together for the various Flashback game lists, I'm willing to bet it's in their power to do so, and then this could turn into an even more satisfying collection.  As it is, not being able to play the world's first game console killer app, nor the Lynx's pack-in title, nor the world's first third-party titles for a game console, makes for a rather spotty history of the company that was once synonymous with "video game".

There are a bunch of M-Network titles in Atari Vault 2, so there is precedent here.

 

Activision hasn't put out a compilation in forever.  Probably not worth their time.    Midway/Williams/Atari Games are now rolled into the same company at Warner but I don't think there's been a Midway compilation in some time either.       If Atari could strike a licensing deal with just those two companies alone it would be huge for this type of compilation.   I can't imagine Atari hasn't thought of that though...

 

Namco still does regular releases with their old IP, so that might be a hard one to get.

 

As for Broderbund, First Star Software..    Atari did get "Big Five" for this collection,  would love if they could do the same for the other mid-80s companies that made a big splash for a short time then vanished.

 

On 12/30/2022 at 5:24 PM, Atariboy said:

But something like the example above with Defender is far enough removed from the original these days where I couldn't imagine WB Interactive even recognizing the 2600 game as an adaptation of their IP or if they did became aware, their legal team feeling like they had a chance in court if they pursued a lawsuit.

Yeah, 2600 Defender is different enough that it could easily be passed off as a Defender knock-off.  But I'm not sure the lawyers would let it slide so easily :)

 

 

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4 hours ago, zzip said:

Yeah, 2600 Defender is different enough that it could easily be passed off as a Defender knock-off.  But I'm not sure the lawyers would let it slide so easily :)

If you mean Atari SA's lawyers, I agree. It took them years just to recognize that they were free and clear to rerelease Indy 500 under the Sears name for the game, so they're obviously extremely risk averse. So I don't envision any creativity happening to eliminate problematic aspects of some of these Atari SA properties to enable them to be rereleased in future collections.

 

But while I only have a limited law background (a few classes in college), I really can't envision Warner's lawyers thinking that they have a case in the highly unlikely event that they even discover that the old 2600 port has been rebranded and rereleased. So many liberties were taken with the 2600 version and far closer adaptations of Defender have appeared in the years since without issue (such as most any unlicensed 80's arcade themed release full of clones of popular arcade games, numerous 8-bit computer clones back in the day, and even Chopper Command on the 2600).

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